Microsoft's Satya Nadella takes a veiled swipe at Anthropic and other AI model makers

Satya Nadella said that it was hypocritical for model makers to complain about distillation. Bloomberg/Getty Images Satya Nadella criticized AI labs for complaining about distillation attacks. Model distillation involves training AI using more advanced pre-existing AI models. Nadella suggested that reliance on leading AI models compromises data ownership and control. Satya Nadella took a quiet swipe at AI labs like Anthropic for how they train their models. In an X post on Sunday, the Microsoft CEO said that model makers complaining about distillation is hypocritical. Distillation is the process of training a less powerful model based on the outputs of a stronger one. "While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation, and to reserve the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data," Nadella wrote. He added that if learning only flows in one direction, owners of the learning infrastructure make all the money while creators of the knowledge get left out. Frontier AI model makers like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind rely on work created by others to train their own models. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini acquire their "intelligence" from publicly available writing, images, and other data. Numerous companies and individuals have sued the leading AI labs over nonconsensual content "scraping. " Though the lab was not named, Nadella's comments seemed especially targeted toward Anthropic. Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei complained that Chinese model makers are stealing his company's work, using Claude to train their own models. Last month, Anthropic wrote a letter to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren saying that Alibaba had recently carried out "the largest known distillation attack " on it to date. "Competitors can use it to acquire